


Mutually Exclusive

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 21:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two times Chuck Hansen and Mako Mori died together in Striker Eureka, and one time they didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mutually Exclusive

**Author's Note:**

> All the cool kids are doing present-tense, second-person perspective about multiple universes these days, right? Obviously Shatterdome Kids was too much sweetness and light for me, so have some angst!

You try to make her happy, but there's really only one world where that's possible. 

The closest you come is the one where, in January 2025, the PPDC operates forty-seven active Jaegers, stationed throughout rim nations. Striker Eureka, the one you jockey beside her, is the first Mark V. The newest, the fastest, the most powerful. You and she are the youngest Rangers in the program. Cameras follow you everywhere. The first time you held her hand during an interview, the gossip rags exploded. The two of you quite like your life, on the whole. 

Leatherback and Otachi come through the Breach together and head well north of you, but your eyes stay on the feeds during two very long fights. Four hours after the war clocks reset in Shatterdomes all over the world, there is a triple event, just as K-Sci said there'd be. 

Where else would the first Category V kaiju go? Who else would be a worthy opponent?

The AKMs have no effect on Slattern. You hit it with the Sting-Blades again and again, and you finally start to make some progress hacking away when those tails tear huge pieces from Striker's hull and Slattern pushes you down in the water. 

You scream, you and her, more rage than pain or fear, and trigger the self-destruct, and your last living thought is that at least you're going out beside her. 

* * *

There's the one where the PPDC dries up slow, and on the day Striker Eureka gets decommissioned, you don't attend the ceremony. You're busy in the drivesuit room, helping her into her armor, and she you. You drill the bolts in place, insert the spinal clamp, and kiss her before you put her helmet on. You've waited your whole life to kiss her. She knows.

No one stops you from getting in the Conn-Pod. No one stops you from walking Striker out of the Shatterdome and into Sydney Harbour, and standing there facing the coastal wall. What could they do, nuke you? 

There are riots in the streets, but some of the people lining the harbour hold signs for you and her.  _Thank you. Save us. We will pray for your souls. Sydney ♥'s Striker._

After nineteen hours in the Drift, stable and pure, you think, _New record_. 

There's not long to wait. You already knew the attacks were growing more frequent and it was only a matter of time before the kaiju returned to Sydney. Mutavore comes through that stupid wall and you walk out to meet it, together. 

You're hungry. Rations got tighter toward the end, and you had only a light breakfast before suiting up. A memory in the Drift, one of yours: finding a bushel of mealy apples in the Shatterdome kitchen, about to be boiled down and processed into something that no longer resembled apples. You took one, brought it to her. You remember how she smiled up at you. She remembers how it tasted. 

You use that hunger on the kaiju. It's a long fight, and hard. Mutavore takes Striker apart one piece at a time. Your right arm is gone by the time you get a volley of AKMs into the bastard. Striker's hull is torn and mangled, left leg shattered. You collapse in Sydney Harbour, can't get back up.

You burn in your drivesuit until Striker's systems finally die; with them goes the Drift, but you still feel her beside you. Faint. And fainter. Burnt up. Nothing left to give. If you could move you would reach for her.

Three hours later, what's left of the Shatterdome staff pries open Striker's hatch. They pull you from the feedback cradle. You reach for her, but she doesn't reach back. You're still ghost Drifting, and you can feel her pulse in your ears as they load you both in a Jumphawk and fly you back into the city. They do their best to prevent the inevitable, but when you feel her go, you follow.

The heroes' graves they make for you and her will last until the apocalypse. Not long to wait.

* * *

Your friend is crazy about swords. He wants something more authentic than the crap he orders off the Internet to decorate his flat. And if you're spending a week in Tokyo anyway, you can take a side trip, right? 

So you go with him out of town a ways, to a place that looks like people might actually call it a village, and you walk from the train station to the workshop with the forge in back. Your friend spends an hour talking to the swordmaker, showing off everything he knows. You spend an hour trying not to stare at her. 

After your friend pays an obscene amount of money--seriously, come on--for a sword he will never, ever use and you walk out of the shop, he looks at you and says "Get your ass in there and talk to her."

You go back inside and, under the serene gaze of a man who could slice you in half whenever he wanted, you ask her, in the worst, most broken tourist's Japanese, to go to dinner with you in the city.

After two days with her in your hotel room, there is a profession of love waiting behind your teeth. You've almost worked up the nerve to say it. Then the sirens go off.

The PPDC's Joint Action Emergency Guard and Early Response is a twofold program that was rolled out ten years ago. Cutting-edge sensors around the Breach detect activity well in advance of a kaiju event, and satellites capable of tracking silicon-based lifeforms follow the kaiju and extrapolate their destination. That's phase one. Phase two is nuking the bastards when they're still well out to sea. 

This came along too late for you--Sydney was already done. But every kaiju after Scissure has been blown to bits before it made landfall. Your sushi dinner two nights ago cost almost as much as your friend's sword, thanks to all the radiation and Kaiju Blue in the Pacific. 

The failsafe part of phase two is the public refuges, which are clean and vast, buried underground and surrounded by steel, then lead, then more steel. You go to one with her, following the rules and leaving all your luggage in the hotel room. You're glad Max isn't with you on this trip; they'd probably have a fit about dogs. The sirens are still going off as you descend from street level. 

Down in the spotless, fluorescent-lit, surgically sterile refuge, you mill around with the others and glance at your watch. This isn't your first time in a refuge, and you should only be down here for half an hour or so before they give the all-clear. You have your arm around her. An hour passes. Then two.

You feel the impact in your gut. The lights die. There are screams. Some of them might be coming from you. There is another impact, and the lights flicker back on a moment later. You stare up at the ceiling, breathing through your nose, every muscle tense, hearing your pulse like a helicopter's blades. Beside you, still under your arm, she says, "It's all right. I know."

Your eyes snap down to her, and you bite your tongue to keep from swearing, from telling her to shut her fucking mouth. She doesn't know. She doesn't have any idea. 

The third impact is the biggest. The PPDC's urban nukes are strictly kaiju killers. Small epicenter, shorter half-life. That was Marshal Sevier's bright idea for a last resort--if we have to bomb our own cities, at least make it so they're habitable again after two months. Resilience, the JAEGER program insists, is a defining trait of humanity. 

That's when the refuge comes fully to life, PPDC officers making announcements about room assignments, about the single landline they will be able to use as soon as interference clears up. There is a tour, in small groups, of the facilities. Ration dispensary with metharocin at every meal, just in case. Gymnasium. Showers. Councilors are available. The thirty PPDC Rangers are introduced: men and women from all over, who wear no weapons and, in fact, no identifying articles at all aside from their dog tags. They are here to help. They are here for your protection.

Everyone gets three changes of clothes in addition to what they wore into the refuge, shapeless grey sweats that remind you of prison, not that you'd know, but someday you'll have to compare notes with Uncle Scott. 

It's only for eight weeks, though. A person can survive anything for eight weeks.

She waits in line all day, every day, for that one phone. You bring her rations, bottles of water. You try to talk to her some while she waits, but there is less and less to say. When the world has been temporarily reduced to this place, you and she already know all the same things. Also you and she were assigned separate rooms, with roommates, so that's out.

Somewhere above and south, your old man is probably losing his shit. Probably pulling every string he has in the program to try to reach you, but that phone is always busy. Then again, maybe he's not trying. Maybe he's given you up for dead. He knows where you were, made the hotel reservation and bought the plane ticket himself. Hell, maybe Herc missed the kaiju on his bomb run while it was still out to sea. Maybe Hercules Hansen was the one who had to drop a nuke on top of his son.

Surviving a kaiju attack and a nuclear detonation is enough stress for just about anyone, but the insult-to-injury of close confinement makes people snap now and then. Two weeks in, you're standing with her in line when some guy a few meters away starts screaming, pulls out a shiv he made from God only knows what, and tries to slash up the people around him. Bad move, because one of the people around him is a Ranger, and he puts the guy on the ground in a flawless leg lock, pathetic knife flying from his hands to be snatched up by another Ranger. 

"You all right?" you say to her, because it seems like you should, even though the guy never got close enough to do any damage.

"I'm fine," she answers. There is something wry in her eyes. "This place is not what I expected."

You want to tell her yeah, you didn't expect eight claustrophobic weeks in Ingsoc either, but the Ranger holding the slasher guy hears her, looks up smiling, and says, "Better or worse?"

Six weeks later you take the first available flight back to Sydney. You walk up the path to your house and rattle the keys extra loud as you unlock the door. Max barks. 

You step across the threshold and then your old man is hugging you, sobbing. An embarrassment. You tell him never to send you on a trip again, yeah?

* * *

You try to make her happy, and you try to keep her alive. But the only world where you can do both those things, Chuck Hansen, is the one where you clear a path for Mako Mori.


End file.
